This collection of Cynthia Anderson's Mojave Desert poems expands and deepens her exploration of the outer and inner landscape. The book is divided into five sections--Refuge, Denizens, Journeys, Mysteries, and Sightings, Approaching the Ancient Camel. Nine exquisite landscape photographs by Bill Dahl enhance the poems, as well as an image of a rare white raven by Julianne Koza.

Praise for Desert Dweller

Cynthia Anderson’s Desert Dweller is spare and unsparing, a desiccated cholla lattice framed by an eternal sky, poetry on the edge of the ineffable. Anderson provides keen observations and a sense of solitary wonder – a trickster coyote’s unheralded death, a woman’s walk at daybreak, the last camel spotted in the wild, stones left on a miner’s grave. I love this collection of poetry and the desert it presents.
– Greg Gilbert, Trustee and Professor Emeritus, Copper Mountain College

Anderson’s language is as stark and spellbound as her subject, rising from the land itself, its alchemy of silence and time, from arias of beauty and melancholy the wind sings. Walk with her through arroyos and canyons, through quicksilver light out past the creosote and lava flows—let her show you how to know the desert with new senses. Desert Dweller is radiant, alive, waiting…
– Marsha de la O, author of Black Hope


Desert Dweller wounds your heart with an animal darkness and heals it with the Mojave sunrise. Her poems are the real deal, an authentic voice exploring and mapping territory where 'if you want to be baptized in the place of no water, humans are not the center.' The poetic intelligence on these pages moves gracefully between human mind and natural world, carrying feathers and songs, dancing with fear and joy. I urge anyone who loves poetry of place to read and learn in Anderson's signature spirit-bird language how 'the desert rests on giants whose bones hold up the earth.'
– Michael Dwayne Smith, publisher-editor of Mojave River Press and Review